Toward Solidarity in Democratic Theory and Practice

I seek to demonstrate that solidarity should be understood as a vital good of democracy, one that is internally, inextricably related to the more familiar democratic values of equality and freedom. Acknowledging solidarity as a vital democratic good, I argue, involves recognizing that democracy entails political agents continually creating for each other the conditions to act as free equals. I build my democratic case for solidarity on Jürgen Habermas’s argument for the co-originality of solidarity with freedom and equality. In particular, I show how a concept crucial to Habermas’s argument, interdependence, can be translated from its original context—discourse ethics and moral agency—to the context of politics and political agency. In doing so, I posit three essential forms of political interdependence: practical, skillful, and ideological interdependence. Drawing on this translation of Habermas’s theory, I explore an immanent movement toward solidarity in three distinct new literatures in political theory that make a place for contentious, extra-institutional practices in democracy. This exploration sets the stage for elaborating a new conception of solidarity highlighting political interdependence.